Jazz-funk band New Mastersounds touch down in Cambridge

By Chad Berndtson/For The Patriot Ledger

Friday

Jun 8, 2018 at 2:21 PM

The New Mastersounds new album, “Renewable Energy,” is as of a piece with everything the prolific British four-piece has put to record: viciously competent fusion that, much like its title suggests, pulses with energy and improvisational chops, hardly letting up.

“We recorded it all over the place, in like seven different places: drums here, guitar here, vocals here,” said guitarist Eddie Roberts, ahead of the band’s upcoming stop at The Sinclair in Cambridge next Wednesday. “I guess we’ve got it down now.”

As one of the better jazz-funk bands of the last two decades, The New Mastersounds keep up a relentless schedule, stopping through the area at least once a year. They formed in Leeds, in the United Kingdom in 1999, with Roberts and drummer Simon Allen joined by bassist Pete Stand and a keyboard player, Bob Birch. Eventually, keys ace Joe Tattoo circulated in behind the organ after Birch left the band, and the core, current New Mastersounds sound solidified.

The band occasionally expands with guests, including woodwinds, brass and singers. But it’s the tighter-than-tight core four that’s slayed audiences all over the world. And the band just keeps cranking out music, having released more than a dozen albums comprising a deep catalog of originals, classics of the jazz-funk canon, and the occasionally left-field cover.

The New Mastersounds will be on the road through much of 2018, though its members have plenty of other pursuits, too. In addition to other bands such as Matador Soul Sounds, with Soulive drummer Alan Evans, Roberts also runs a nonprofit focused on ending and preventing homelessness.

In December, The New Mastersounds will reconvene for another album. The band loves to record, Roberts said, and keeping up that brisk pace of new album releases helps to keep many new songs in rotation to freshen the sets.

It’s a successful pattern the group has followed for nearly two decades.

“Next year is 20 years, but for so long you’re four guys just trying to make it doing this,” Roberts said. “One day you look up and you’re making it. It’s a life we chose and it’s still exciting to us.”